May 8, 2008

Drawing up plans

Group is evaluating ideas to present to the city council to redevelop the Howard Avenue Safeway

By Mark Abramson / Daily News Staff Writer

When Burlingame's city council and planning commission meet next month to talk about redeveloping the Safeway site on Howard Avenue, they will be presented with what an advisory group considers the best one or two design ideas it has come up with in the past year.

The Safeway Working Group has generated 16 design ideas since it started meeting in April 2007 and intends to narrow its choices by the June 12 meeting. Group members include city residents, downtown property and business owners, chamber of commerce officials, petitioners for a new Safeway, the grassroots group Citizens for a Better Burlingame and Safeway officials.

"The June 12 meeting is what it is all about," said group facilitator Candace Hathaway.

The group's ideas have ranged from building a Safeway atop street-level parking to putting a parking lot on the store's roof. Another idea is to build a multistory parking garage nearby with a long ramp to the store's rooftop parking and to Howard Avenue and Primrose Road.

The group also grappled with where to place the store on the 1450 Howard Ave. site.

"Someone came up with parking on the roof and there was dead silence and we were like, let's look at that," Hathaway said.

The city council and planning commission could either choose one of the recommended designs or ask the working group to explore other ideas. If Safeway decides to fine-tune the design it would have to get the city's approval, a process that City Manager Jim Nantell said could take a year.

Before the joint session, Safeway Working Group members will meet one or two times to evaluate the designs and choose the best, Hathaway said.

The city and Safeway brought in Hathaway after the council and a group of residents called Citizens for a Better Burlingame opposed a redevelopment effort in 2004. They contended the proposed 62,000-square-foot store was too massive.

When Safeway backed down, city and store officials organized the working group to come up with a plan that residents, the grocery chain and other interested parties would support. The group has looked at redeveloping the site with a Safeway only, a Safeway with retail and office space, a Safeway with residential units, and a Safeway with mixed office, retail and residential space.

"Personally, I think that mixed use could be a positive if it is done in the right way," Planning Commissioner Richard Terrones said.

Downtown could become more vibrant with more people living there and patronizing nearby restaurants and other businesses, Terrones said.

Safeway has not built any projects that have mixed-use residential, but the company is a tenant in developments that have such uses, Hathaway said.



E-mail Mark Abramson at mabramson@dailynewsgroup.com.